Desperate Children - GZ

There’s the rigor required to make any work of art that has lasting value…and then there’s rigor as an aesthetic, which is, I believe, what you’re talking about, John. It’s always hard to generalize, but I think you’re essentially correct. It seems to me there are intriguing reasons why the kind of stripped down aesthetic you identify in Dreyer and Bresson increasingly coincides with artistic quality. More on that after a few qualifiers. Hitchcock, Kurasawa and Kubrick, for example, are interested in surface as well as depth, wanting to disappear inside the culture, seducing the viewer in pursuit of maximizing the impact of their work. There’s also the issue of senor Bunuel, who managed to be both remarkably prolific and, well, lazy at the same time. You could say he found rigor in different places than Bresson, and typically with his tongue firmly planted in his cheek. But he wanted some level of narrative transparency in order to achieve the kinds of effects he was interested in generating in an audience. This is clearly very close to your sense of what Fassbinder was doing.

Having said all that I think the transition between the maximalism of Joyce and the minimalism of Beckett points to the way language itself - the phenomenon of signification, discernment, the trap of meaning versus the ever-shifting nature of truth - has come to be seen as the source of civilization’s discontents post World War II. I think the role of poetry and the arts is about underscoring the interplay of form and what the Buddhists mean by “emptiness.” Typically confused in the West with void or absence, “emptiness” is simply the result of the interdependent nature of all phenomena, which are said to be “empty” of independent existence. The close attention of the poet ensures that the words of a poem bring with them the silence, as it were, out of which they arose. We turn to art for temporary relief from the tyranny of form, to which can be traced the discontents of over-civilization. In the post-war period the culture of marketing and consumer capitalism, and especially the American advertising industry, began to exploit these same techniques for commercial ends, and artists were forced toward rigor in order to underscore the very different intention fueling their creative project.

There’s a remarkably direct political dimension here too. This came home to me watching Alfonso Cuaron’s film on Naomi Klein’s “The Shock Doctrine.” Shock is one of the most fundamental tactics any artist uses to engage an audience. The function of a regular meter in a line of poetry, for example, is to set up a small shock when the poet then breaks the rhythm. The reader is thrown momentarily into an experience of “emptiness,” a sudden minor epiphany or experience of freedom…which the artist then uses to draw the reader further in. The poet (or composer, or actor) builds a sequence of surprises in this way, amplifying and modulating these effects to create a cumulative experience. It’s interesting to note that two of the most successful deployers of political shock of the 20th century - Hitler and Stalin - were both artists before they were politicians. The American NeoCons of today, I feel certain, view themselves as political artists drawing inspiration from Ayn Rand, Machiavelli and, (Leo Strauss’ misreading of) Aristotle.

I love the way Klein has so succinctly identified the lessons the CIA and other arms of the American plutocracy drew from the European calamities of the early part of the century, and how bloodlessly they are being deployed right now. The Neocons especially take pride in all this. Reducing us to our reptilian brain and its atavistic responses confirms in them their cherished self-images of being an Aristotelian elite, doing what must be done in a nightmarish version of noblesse oblige.

Compassion, in this context, is certainly a challenge. But compassion has to be understood as a natural byproduct of non-separation from the Other. This is different than the Judeo-Christian view of compassion, which calls for an act of will such that expressions of selflessness are still self-based. In Buddhism, compassion is viewed as a basic feature of awareness - nothing is being supressed or surrendered or transcended. One of the advantages of this kind of compassion from a tactical perspective is that not separating from the (oppressive) Other yields crucial insights into intentions and motivations. You are less likely to miss the hidden agenda that explains disparate covert behaviors, or fall for the sleight-of-hand trade craft of “perception management.” You can see where I’m going with this - however Klein arrived at her clarity regarding the tactics of the Right, her book The Shock Doctrine is a good example of how effective sheer insight can be in terms of countering an agenda of domination. Seeing the way the behavior of NeoCons is linked to a cherished self-image is another potentially powerful insight, a chink in the armor of insufferable smugness and aggression. It’s quite startling now to see the panic set in on Fox News as their tactics are exposed by writers like Klein and as the juggernaut of global warming looms higher and higher on the horizon. They must be seen as children, fueled by desperate fantasies.

You’ll notice in my last post I write about Buddhist theories of mind rather than Buddhist beliefs and I think it’s crucial not to confuse the two. Buddhism is a term it’s easy to toss around and it refers to many things, religious and otherwise. There’s a whole school developing now of pragmatic Buddhism (see especially Stephen Batchelor) that combines elements from all the different Buddhist traditions, leaving to the side those aspects of Buddhist doctrine - reincarnation, for example - that call for leaps of faith, etc. and focusing instead on the empirical aspects of the practice which are actually quite dominant when compared to Western spiritual traditions. The central thrust of all the Buddhist traditions is heavily empirical - direct observation of the mind as it encounters experience. This is why Western scientists often take to Buddhist practice quite easily, and it suggests that the deepening encounter between Buddhism and the West will continue to develop in transformative ways.

This is a huge subject, obviously, but in our current exchange we’ve often commented on how the dogma of progress in the West infects our thinking at every level, chaining even the most left wing liberationist doctrines to the engine of industrial development, environmental degradation, and the cancerous, endless growth agenda. From this point of view the medievalism of much Buddhist thought may act as a useful counter, pivoting us toward an embrace of balance as a dynamic and responsive “middle way” between explosive growth and confining tradition. Let me close by saying again that I don’t in any way consider myself an Anti-Marxist. Far from it - Marx was the great thinker of the 19th century and remains central to any understanding of the modern world. My view is still, however, that Marx is parenthetical to the Enlightenment, his view of man colored by the assumptions of the first proponents of liberal thinking. I’m being polemical, obviously, but I think it’s important to look forward toward a new synthesis…and in this I suppose I’m only being a good Marxist…

Guy Zimmerman